The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,5
which color board they’re going to get. Hang looks real happy, not. Speaking of unhappiness, he warns, “Cheerful’s up there.”
Ben Carruthers, aka Cheerful, is Boone’s friend, a miserable, saturnine millionaire who would qualify for the Gentlemen’s Hour if he didn’t actually loathe the water. He’s lived in Pacific Beach for thirty years and has never actually been to the beach or the Pacific.
“What do you have against the beach?” Boone asked him once.
“It’s sandy.”
“The beach is sand.”
“Exactly,” Cheerful answered. “And I don’t like water either.”
Which pretty much does it, beachwise.
Cheerful is, to say the least, eccentric, and one of his weirder things is a quixotic crusade to stabilize Boone’s finances. The utter futility of this exercise makes him blissfully unhappy, hence the sobriquet. Right now he has his tall frame slouched over an old-style adding machine. His slate-gray hair, styled in a high crew cut, looks like brushed steel.
“Nice of you to make an appearance,” he says, pointedly looking at his watch as Boone comes upstairs.
“Things are slow,” Boone says. He steps out of his boardshorts, kicks off his sandals, and goes into the little bathroom that adjoins the office.
“You think you’re going to speed them up by not coming in till eleven?” Cheerful asks. “You think work just floats around on the water?”
“As a matter of fact . . .” Boone says, turning on the shower. He tells Cheerful about his conversation with Dan, adding with a certain sadistic satisfaction that Nichols is FedExing a substantial retainer.
“You demanded a retainer?” Cheerful asks.
“It was his idea.”
“For a moment,” Cheerful says, “I thought you had learned some fiscal responsibility.”
“Nah.”
Boone steps into the shower just long enough to rinse the salt water off his skin, then gets out and dries off. He doesn’t bother to wrap the towel around himself as he steps back into the office to look for a clean shirt—okay, a reasonably undirty shirt—and a pair of jeans.
Petra Hall is standing there.
Of course she is, Boone thinks.
“Hello, Boone,” she says. “Nice to see you.”
She looks gorgeous, in a cool linen suit, her black hair cut in a retro pageboy, her violet eyes shining.
“Hi, Pete,” Boone says. “Nice to be seen.”
Smooth, he thinks as he retreats into the bathroom.
Idiot.
8
“Business or pleasure?” he asks when he comes back in, Petra having handed him a shirt and jeans.
She gave him his clothes a tad reluctantly because (a) it’s fun to see him embarrassed; and (b) it’s not exactly painful to see him in the buff, Boone Daniels being, well, buff. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with the lean, long muscles that come from a lifetime of paddling a surfboard and swimming.
“And why can’t business be a pleasure?” she asks in that upper-class British accent that Boone finds alternately aggravating and attractive. Petra Hall is a junior partner at the law firm of Burke, Spitz, and Culver, one of Boone’s steadier clients. She got her good looks and petite frame from her American mother, her accent and attitude from her British dad.
“Because it usually isn’t,” Boone answers, feeling for some reason that he wants to argue with her.
“Then you really should find a new line of work,” she says, “one that you can enjoy. In the meantime . . .”
She hands him the slim file that was tucked under her arm. Boone nudges a copy of Surfer magazine off the cluttered desk to make a little room, sets the file down, and opens it. A deep red flush comes over his cheeks as he shuts the file, glares at her, and says, “No.”
“What does that mean?” Petra asks.
“It means no,” Boone says. He’s quiet for a second and then says, “I can’t believe Alan is taking this case.”
Petra says, “Everyone has the right to a defense.”
Boone points down at the file. “Not him.”
“Everyone.”
“Not him.”
Boone glares at her again, then slides his feet into a well-worn pair of Reef sandals and walks out.
Petra and Cheerful listen to him pound down the stairs.
“Actually,” she says, “that didn’t go as badly as I anticipated.”
Petra had known before she asked that the Corey Blasingame case was deeply hurtful to Boone, that it put into doubt everything he believed in, everything he’d built his life upon.
9
Kelly Kuhio was a freaking legend.
No—K2 was a freaking legend.
Build a surfing pantheon? KK’s in it. Carve a Mount Surfers’ Rushmore? You’re going to be blasting Kelly’s face into that rock. Just make a list of the all-time good guys who’ve ever ridden a board? Kelly Kuhio is in your Top Ten.
Nobody who ever